


Curses and Other Metal Constructs

by eek_a_tron



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Bickery Banter, Canon Compliant, F/M, Flangst (fluff and angst), Force Bond (Star Wars), Inspired by Fanart, Mild Sexual Content, Non-Consensual Scuffling, One Shot, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Reylo - Freeform, Sad Soft Space Babies Not Found (Or ARE They), Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, They Should Probably Just Bang It Out (But "Consumed with Lust" Continues to Be My Preferred Jam), Throne Room, You Sit on a Throne of HURRRRGHG
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-24 17:53:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16645004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eek_a_tron/pseuds/eek_a_tron
Summary: Inspired bythisfanart!  Thanks,Picarito!A post-TLJ, bickery-bantery throne room one shot, in which Rey materializes on the Supreme Leader’s throne, and in which he reacts about as poorly as one can imagine.  (There’s also a definiteBurn the Boatsprequel-ish vibe going on in here — just a little something to tide myself over during BTB’s ongoing hiatus.  I’d really like to experiment with different characterizations, one shots, and even AUs, eventually, but the gods of free time are fickle.)





	Curses and Other Metal Constructs

            Defeating Snoke had been simple.  It was the Force _itself_  that would eventually kill Kylo Ren.

            He felt more sure of it every day.

            Even now, electricity crawled through his veins — a prickling, near-burning feeling, strong enough to singe — and then Rey became a trick of the wild energies between the stars.  Solid, yet temporary.  Present, but not present.

            She didn’t look at him.  She _never_ looked at him anymore. It didn’t matter how swiftly he set his jaw, nor how loudly he slammed down his datapad and waved the lone officer out of the throne room.  Grinding his teeth produced no answering wince.  Rey’s blank, distracted face, illuminated by her own datapad, only shone more brightly than usual.

            Why didn’t their Force-bond boil  _her_  blood? Why didn’t the same electricity set  _her_  on fire? The bond dared — _she_ dared — to recline Rey right in the center of the Supreme Leader’s throne. _His_ throne. The datapad in her lap claimed all her attention, but he couldn’t hear the cool, clear tone of her reading in his head. Rey’s wall against him forbade even that.

            Stubborn.  Willful.   _Determined_ to be blind and deaf to him, to this, as he could never be.

            But her nose scrunched into a frown.

            Small, dark mercies.

            Kylo quickly closed the space between them as he ascended the raised platform.  For a long moment, his own nose provided a downward slope for his scowl.

            “If you’re going to keep popping in like this,” Rey announced, finally, firmly, “you should speak up when you do.”

            His jaw might as well have imploded. _He_ hadn’t popped in. _She’d_ popped in. Outrageous, insufferable — as if he didn’t have better things to do, as if he couldn’t reach out and yank that datapad _right out of her hands_ if he wanted to — although he probably couldn’t; he hadn’t exactly tested all of the bond’s limits.

            Rey pressed the data-screen against her chest, her sudden glare sheeting Kylo with ice.  One of her knees shifted over the other.

            Lolling.  That was the word for it.  Rey looked like she was _lolling_ on his throne.  Kylo’s clenching fists practically cracked at his sides.

            “What do _you_ want?”  She said it too primly.  Too airily.  

            What a fraud.

            Kylo bent closer, one fist creaking against the throne’s wide metal arm.  “Do you even have the slightest idea where you’re sitting?”

            “I,” Rey gripped her datapad again, “don’t _care_.” The device winked out of sight as she tossed it aside.

            “You’re in my chair.”

            “You know perfectly well I’m not sitting anywhere near _you_ at all.”

            “My _chair_ ,” Kylo pressed on, ominously.

            The satisfying spark of Rey’s realization proved short-lived.  “Then find another one,” she retorted, “or stop summoning me.  Or whatever you’re doing to make this keep happening.”

            His mouth twisted downward. Entire squadrons had died under that look.

            Rey only reclined further.  “I’m certainly not going to tell you where I’m really sitting, or where — anything _else_ is.”

            Was she mocking him or recoiling from him?  Either way, there was something _off_ about it.   Boxing Rey in, Kylo’s other hand braced against the back of his throne.  “I don’t control the bond.  But you’re in the way.”  She looked, for all the galaxy, like an empress awry. A tousled, bristling one.  One hiding something from him.  Nevertheless.  “This is where I sit, now.”

            Her chin trembled.  Lifted.  “It’s not as impressive as you think.  The price of entry was half off.”

            Kylo’s hand flinched beside her ear.  Behind that visceral wall, behind Rey’s steely resolve — there was _something_ — important — 

            “Don’t even  _think_ about stomping around in my head.”   Beneath her level glare, Rey’s heartbeat was anything but.

            A mechanical throat-clearing echoed over the empty throne room.  “Supreme Leader, the emissaries from Chaaktil are waiting outside.  Shall I announce them?”

            Kylo snapped up, cape whirling — longer now, and more ornate — to face a protocol droid idling gawkishly near the main doorway.  “I gave _specific_ orders for no one to enter this room without my permission.”

            A distinct  _tch_  rang out behind him.

             _“You will leave that chair,”_ Kylo muttered, several registers under his breath.   _“Now.”_

            “Forgive me for correcting you, Supreme Leader, but my operating system has never allowed me to sit, and certainly never in the seat of authority — ”

            “Not _you_.”  Kylo pinched a thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose.  Were protocol droids  _always_ oblivious?  Why were they  _made_  that way?  Lucky for the droid, it had no breath to choke away. Unluckily, however, its memory was all too easily erased. Kylo waited for the droid’s soft-reset tone to fire before sweeping a glance back toward the throne.

            Rey was definitely still sitting there, definitely able to hear echoing voices in the bond, and definitely _smiling_.  “You know, we’ve been wondering where Chaaktil’s loyalties lie.”  She folded her legs beneath her.  Hunkered down.  Made herself comfortable.

            Spy.  

            Kylo’s face must have endured a thousand tics by the time Rey vanished.  Every nerve-ending crawled, again, inside his veins.

            Defector.

            For weeks afterward, whispers in the officers’ mess hall centered on the fact that Kylo Ren never sat down, not once, during the Chaaktil conference.  The current Supreme Leader frightened the hell out of everyone just by  _sulking silently_  on that foreboding metallic thing; standing and pacing nearby, an endless void pooling in his eyes,  _must_  portend something truly terrible.

            After all, the former Leader had met his end on the precursor to that very throne.  Even a replica of the thing was probably cursed.

            

***

            

            If she sat in the same place, it didn’t _necessarily_ mean she’d materialize in the same space.

            Or did it?

            Rey propped herself up against the wall in her bunk, its cooling metal — recycled duralloy, expertly-fused — against her back.  She held her datapad, too, in case that was part of the trick.  One leg crossed over the other.  No, her hair had been different before. Grumbling audibly, she coaxed it back into a rumpled, one-less-bun state.

            Fine.  There.

            The possibility for further intel was too important to pass up, she told herself.  Overhearing at least _some_  of the First Order’s Chaaktil conference had saved a small Resistance mission from going south.  And perhaps, if she was careful — always careful, a _lifetime_ of being careful — she’d discover how to turn off the bond, before Kylo Ren could do the same to her.

            So Rey sighed.  Flipped on her datapad.  Waited.

            Nothing happened.

            Outside her designated quarters, the Resistance starship hummed with life.  General Organa’s scrappy crew — and more — bordered the edges of Rey’s ever-expanding consciousness, as though their nervous energies filled an enormous tin.  (It was the “and more” part about which Rey was currently reading, via datapad.  Guardedly, of course.  She had a lot to absorb.)

            Still nothing.

            Rey shifted uncomfortably on her bunk.  Most nights, she slept on the floor next to it.  Only Finn seemed to understand this particular idiosyncrasy — the First Order couldn’t be bothered to soften _anybody’s_ bed, let alone that of a frightened child-soldier far from home — so if Finn was sent to wake Rey, they simply traded stories about literally sinking into their separate mattresses, and how funny it was, sort of, to feel  _engulfed_  by fairly bare-bones Resistance comfort.  Rose saw it differently. Whenever  _she_ roused Rey from lying in her customary ball on the cold duralloy floor, the pity radiating off of Rose in worried, sympathetic waves suggested that there was something wrong with Rey sleeping there.

            Something was wrong with _her_ , Rey supposed.

            Well.  She couldn’t repair herself right now.  She had to get by. Grow stronger. Learn about all the things inside of her and all the things beyond. Had to survive.

            She read for awhile.

            How must she have looked, perched on that uncomfortable torture-throne in that red, dead room?  How did _he_ look, when he sat there?  Did it ever feel as numb as the floor in her quarters?

            She drifted.  Beneath her, the mattress twitched.

            Warm.  Broad.

            Black.

            Not just a mattress.

            Rey bolted upright. “ _Get up!_ ”

            As she shot to the edge of her bunk, a reactive hand seized one of her wrists — and then seized the other, absolutely on purpose.  “I can’t.  There’s something in my chair.”

            “ _Sod_ your chair,” Rey bellowed. Her datapad clattered to the floor.

            The Force _had_ conjured her back inside the ill-lit confines of the First Order throne room — sitting right in Kylo Ren’s gods-damned  _lap_.  And out of surprise, contempt, or simple, kriffing revenge, he seemed hell-bent on keeping her there.

            Panic spread through the painful wiring between them.  Panic, and fury, but not fear. It was the lack of fear, Rey sensed, that didn’t make any sense to him.

            Why was she _lying?_

            Of _course_ she was afraid of him.

            She’d  _left_. She always left.

            Unable to process Kylo’s bond-addled fuming, Rey drove her elbow into what had to be the galaxy’s most well-padded ribs.  Besides a grunt and some low-throated profanity, Kylo only moved to pin her wrists at her sides.  “ _Spy_ ,” he hissed.  “You’ll be sorry to know I’m alone this time.”

            “Pig!”  Rey seethed, her driving elbow becoming a drill.  “Lummox!”

            “L — _hgghh_  — lummox?”

            “Lumbering  _ox!_ ”

            Kylo chuffed, struggling to keep Rey from digging a hole in his torso.  “How are you able to appear in the same place?”

            “ _This_ isn’t how you have a conversation!”

            Before she could aim a kick at his shin, Kylo wrapped her legs beneath his. “What would you know about it?  You haven’t talked to me for months.”  He swore loudly as Rey’s elbow made contact with a particularly sore rib.  

            His pain became her own, and she punctuated his _hgghh_  with an enraged squeak.  “I don’t _want_ to talk to you!  I don’t owe you  _talk!_ "

            “Don’t you?   _Uggh — Rey!_ ”  He should have overpowered her easily. It didn't make any sense, unless she was using the Force. When did she get better at it? _How_ did she get better at it? Kylo managed to raise one knee, which also raised the hissing, spitting ball of electricity currently crushing him into the throne. “Stop flailing around!  Can’t you feel it too?”

            “I’ve felt worse!”  Rey’s face turned scarlet as she scrabbled for less-mortifying purchase atop her traitorously-soft bunk.  He didn’t let her didn’t find any. Gods, why did his thighs have to be so sodding enormous?  “You thought I’d just listen politely while you — trap — and — pry?”

            “I didn’t think that far _ahead_ ,” Kylo shot back in a near-growl as Rey started in on his other side. “So help me, Rey, if you don’t sit _still —_ ”

            “You can’t paralyze me through whatever _this_ is!”

            Kylo hauled her back against his chest with both arms.  The recoil of Rey’s outrage angled his head uncomfortably against the backrest.  “How do you know?” he demanded, raggedly.

            “You would have already done it by now!”  Rey twisted in his grasp.  She might as well have shouted at a boulder.  Kylo’s immovable breadth fit against the curve of her back as if he were part of the bunk, or his throne, or the starstuff where she ended and he began. “Let _go_ of me!”

            R’iia’s.

            Blasted.

             _Shorts._

            Kylo’s response to all of Rey’s writhing finally registered beneath her.  Straining against what had become painfully-constrictive trousers, his massive erection proved impossible to ignore.  A rush of complete and utter terror coursed through the bond right along with it — then shame — a huff — and a deep, dark, unending well of spite.

            The overwhelming clash of emotions stilled her.  “What — ”  And an  _answering_ thrill, between Rey’s own thighs, abruptly cut her off.

            No.

            Not now.

            In the months since Ahch-To, ever since Crait, Rey had managed to keep her more useless feelings well-and-truly buried.  Now, in their connected wake, Rey felt Kylo leaning forward, staring down at her.  Agog. She  _had_ to be mocking him.

            But Rey hadn’t used the Force to fling herself completely out of his grasp.

            And she’d found her way back to the very chair he’d warned her out of — plonking herself, defiantly, right onto the same insulting perch.

            And then Rey tilted her face away so at least she didn’t have to _see him staring_ , and then Ben’s nose was in her hair — _Kylo’s_ nose was in her _hair_.  “Stop smelling me!” she roared at him, with resonance that hardly seemed her own.

            He released one of her wrists.  “I’m — not!”

            The connection inside their inexorable minds finally gave her secret life.

            She wanted him.  Even now.  After all this.  From his lips to his voice, from his body to his brain, in dreams and in ever so many more unbidden thoughts.  She wanted even that reckless, confoundingly uncertain length stirring beneath her.   Maybe especially that.  Maybe only that.

            Maybe everything.

            “Rey.”  She felt Kylo breathe against her.  He unfolded the cross of his arms.  Lowered his knee.  She was small and electric and bright, and he was a void she could not heal.

            She didn’t look behind her.  She _wouldn’t_ look behind her. Not at _him._

            “Just tell me where you are,” Kylo murmured, bending forward slightly, his chest taut against her back, “and this will all be over.  It’s all right, Rey.”  She curled forward beneath him, as if inching toward a metal floor too far below. He neared the threshold of her neck. “The Order wouldn’t execute my apprentice for spying.”

            Rey wrenched herself sideways.  Bracing one foot against the duralloy floor — helpful, familiar,  _numbing_  floor — she clapped her free hand across Kylo’s cheek before stumbling off the boulder, the throne, the bunk. Away from him.

            Soundlessly, Kylo rubbed at the mutual sting.

            Pain radiated in her own face, but Rey only clenched her fists at her sides.  Clenched her teeth, while she was at it.  “I told you to _stop_  messing with my head!”

            Beneath Kylo’s hand, even the cheek Rey _hadn’t_ slapped looked beet-red.  “I didn’t ask you to haunt me.  I didn’t ask you to sit on my throne.”

            Yes he had.  “ _Your_ throne?” she repeated.

            “Yes, mine.”  He glared.  “It’s mine.”

            “Happy with it?”

            His glare got longer.  “Happy _there?_ ”

            The starship communicator in Rey’s quarters fizzled to life.  “Hey, Rey ... status report, please.”  Feedback crackled over the speaker.  “You okay?  The night patrol thought you might be doing ... some kind of shouting.  Are you, uh, doing shouting?”  Rose’s worried, sympathetic aura crackled right along with the speaker.

            Rey lunged for the call button.  “I’m all right.  I — I fell asleep.  Must’ve had a nightmare.  Sorry.”  

            “No need to be sorry.  Finn’s on duty tonight; I’ll send him right over.”

            “I’m okay.  Really — ”

            “Already on it!”  The communicator fizzled out, taking Rose’s scurrying energy signature with it.

            “You’re in your room.”

            Rey whirled.  “Will you go _away?_ ” 

            “You didn’t.”  Kylo’s eyes had narrowed to slits, for some reason.

            “That’s true.”  She ran a furtive glance over the electrical panel near her door.  She could keep it from opening.  Call it a simple malfunction.  “But I also didn’t play Sith tricks with your head.”

            “I didn’t — I don’t — ” Kylo began, only to reroute himself entirely.  “They don’t trust you, do they?”

            She crossed her arms. “They just want to make sure I’m all right.”

            “Are you?”  He hadn’t moved from his visualized seat on her bunk, the same old gloves gripping the edge. Always encased, no matter what.  Always numb.

            “If you don’t go, or — or at least put your fingers in your ears,” Rey nearly whispered, her arms stiffening, “I’ll never talk to you again.”

            He snorted. Swallowed. “What a _threat_.”

            “But if you do leave, I will.  Talk.  Sometime.”  She focused on the floor.  “When I’m not angry.”

            She sensed Kylo leaning forward, enthroned.  Sensed him thinking, there.  Sensed the danger, here.  “A Jedi isn’t supposed to get angry.”

            “Well,” she said, “that’s up for debate.”

            By the time Finn arrived, Kylo had indeed gone — although by design or accident, Rey couldn’t say.  The usual electrical nausea took his place, along with a phantom pain in her cheek, an uneasy ache at her core, and a nagging, inexplicable sense of guilt.  Because she’d lied.  Because she was a fraud.  Because Rey was _not_ going to talk to Kylo Ren ever again. Not anymore. Not a chance. No way.

            First, she’d have to find some means of extricating herself from the bond.  She’d figure out how to fix — or fuse — the rest later.

            A throne’s curse couldn’t last forever.

**Author's Note:**

> _Q: Did you write this just to get Feisty!Rey calling Fuming!Kylo a lummox out of your system?_
> 
> A: No? But also, maybe? Look, I know they don’t have the word “lummox” in _Star Wars_ , but “lumtha” (lumbering bantha?) just isn't the same. Plus, there’s always The Diner Rule: if Obi-Wan can patronize a 1950s-America style diner, _in canon_ , then anything’s possible in _Star Wars_. Including cursing-slang shenanigans.
> 
> P.S. [Who gets a moodboard?](https://eek-a-tron.tumblr.com/post/180218636210/curses-and-other-metal-constructs-a-feistyreylo) You get a moodboard! And YOU get a moodboard! EVERY SCRIBBLE GETS A MOODBOARD!
> 
> I’m on [Tumblr](http://eek-a-tron.tumblr.com) and now sometimes [Twitter](https://twitter.com/eek_a_tron); come say hi!


End file.
